The Monastery is a reality television series originally made in the United Kingdom in 2005. The format involves a number of individuals, who are not necessarily religious, spending a period of time in a place of religious retreat.[1] It has since been copied for UK sequels and in the United States and Australia.
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The UK series The Monastery was filmed at Worth Abbey and first transmitted in 2005-6.[2] Produced by Tiger Aspect for the BBC, it won the Merit Award for Religious Programming in the prestigious Sandford St. Martin Trust Awards in 2006.
The series was re-broadcast by other television networks. The BBC commissioned follow-up series entitled The Monastery Revisited; The Convent, in which four women spent 40 days in a Convent of the Poor Clares;[3][4] and The Retreat in 2007 in which a group of men and women lived together in a Muslim school of prayer.[2][5]
The US version, also called The Monastery, was made by the Discovery Channel and broadcast on TLC. It debuted on 22 October 2006 and aired on Sundays at 10:00 pm. In the first season, five men of various backgrounds who were facing personal crises volunteered to live at a Benedictine monastery, the Monastery of Christ in the Desert in northern New Mexico, for 40 days.[6]
ABC in Australia made a similar series, The Abbey, in which five women spent 33 days living the life of an enclosed Benedictine nun.[7]